God, It’s Amazing the Junk People Will Buy! When a Construction Impacts Lexical Choices: The Case of Nouns in Concealed Exclamations

This chapter focuses on nouns occurring in NPs embedded in three exclamative constructions (It’s amazing the car he bought, You would not believe the car he bought, and I can’t get over the car he bought). We argue that the syntactic and semantic conditions which must be met by the NPs to be embedded in exclamative predicates impact the choice of nouns. These constructions express surprise at a high degree yet are not explicitly scalar. The scalar interpretation is conveyed by the construction as a whole: the embedded NP the car he bought is a semantic equivalent of what a car he bought! We find that even if, in theory, any noun can potentially head an exclamative NP, in practice nouns with semantic features that enable a more direct scalar reading prevail. To determine what makes a noun apt to express degree exclamation, 277 instances of the constructions were collected. We establish a link between the semantic features of the nouns and the meaning of the NP and of the construction, which leads us to conclude that these constructions share an affinity with less prototypical nouns.